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Review : Collected works

27 September 1997

By Fred Pearce

WHAT is the environment? Damned if I know, and I’m an environment writer.
Graham Chapman and colleagues, the authors of Environmentalism and the Mass
Media (Routledge, £18.99, ISBN 0415155053) suggest that “the
environment is everything”, a problem when they assessed environmental coverage
on TV news. But their definition is handy, too.

We can all be environmentalists, for one thing. Industrialists and
historians, sociologists and biologists: all can claim a slice of this vast
territory. Academics looking for fresh material can pass their ideas through the
environmental prism and see what image is projected. And that is a common thread
running through these disparate “environmental” books.

Sometimes the results are all too predictable. Media analysts Chapman and
company discover that—surprise, surprise—British news editors view
the environment in terms of conflict. When the subject turns out to be more
complicated than Greenpeace versus the devil, they get bored.

Sometimes the authors acquire magical powers. So climate modellers, the geeks
from the back room at Britain’s Meteorological Office, have taken on a
superhuman status as soothsayers of global doom. And geographers discovered that
their subject could be recast as sexy and modern. The more abstruse processes of
geomorphology, learned and forgotten in dingy classrooms years ago, are
redefined as “desertification”.

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By such alchemy a humble sedimentologist, Kevin Pickering from University
College London, gets to write with Lewis Owen an Introduction to Global
Environmental Issues (Routledge, £17.99, ISBN 0415140994). This is an
up-to-date tome, but dully written. But, published on both sides of the
Atlantic, it has a fair chance of securing annual royalties for its authors for
some time to come. There’s gold in them thar deforested, desertified,
smog-shrouded hills.

Even professional Australians can find a new way to expose the colonial chips
on their sunburnt shoulders. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, editors of
Ecology and Empire (Keele University Press, £14.95/AUS&dollar;29.95,
ISBN 1853311995) charge that ecology was one of the intellectual powerhouses of
European colonialism, imposing European values about nature on foreign lands.
“Ecology is the lens through which we claim to be reinterpreting imperial
history,” writes Griffiths, who at times even blames ecologists for the racist
“White Australia” policy earlier this century.

This charge seems to be stretching the point—it’s a bit like blaming
tobacco farmers for the Cuban missile crisis. But it shows the power, distorting
or otherwise, of the environmental prism. And, as the essays in Varieties of
Environmentalism (Earthscan, £14.95, ISBN 1853833290) show, there is
a long tradition of linking green politics with ideas about colonial
exploitation—notably in the German Green movement and in green groups in
developing countries such as India.

On the “merchandising of biodiversity”, the book asks whether, in our rush to
conserve biological diversity, we are inadvertently commercialising this
resource and ushering in a new era of ecological colonialism. As one southern
environmentalist charged his northern cousins: “What you call bioprospecting, we
call biopiracy.”

Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier also usefully contrast the political
green agenda, enthused with ideas about sustainable development, with the “cult
of wilderness”. This is most vibrant in the US, where it spawned both the
19th-century tradition of pristine national parks and the more modern Deep
Ecology movement. Earlier this year at the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species (CITES) in Zimbabwe, the wilderness lobby’s bid to save the
African elephant clashed with sustainable developers wanting to resume a limited
trade in ivory.

Out in the American West, meanwhile, commerce is seen by many as the saviour
of the environment, freeing the region’s vast state-held lands from
mismanagement by big government. The Next West, edited by John Baden
and Donald Snow (Island Press, £22.95, ISBN 155963460X) is by far the most
challenging book in this collection, and espouses a kind of buccaneering
frontier environmentalism. It asks questions like “Is `libertarian
environmentalist’ an oxymoron?” And it wonders if a new coalition of New Agers,
Deep Ecologists and Mormons might cause the American West to secede from
Washington. Heady stuff this environmental brew, whatever it means.